Psychedelic Era Beatles

By Will South from Thirteen Senses

The Beatles must have discovered shroomadelica back then, how else do you explain those moustache?

It was the first thing that made me want to play guitar. I remember ‘Blue Jay Way’ having a big impact. It was quite a psychedelic track and suddenly I understood. I always remember Lennon saying he only wanted to get to the stage on guitar where he could express himself and he didn’t need to be like Jimi Hendrix to express himself through songs.

I’m not great guitarist or pianist but I’ve learned enough to write a song.

It was really interesting reading about their LA mansion parties doing loads of acid and how it all inspired them. Will Thirteen Senses go through that period? I wouldn’t rule such a period out! I’ll go with the flow and however I feel at the time. If The Beatles did it, I’d say it’s not a bad thing. I’d probably jump off a cliff if The Beatles did it, as long as they survived!.

They all discovered how to loop tape samples around the time of ‘Revolver’ with all these weird beats and reverse guitars. They all had to go home and come back with their sample and Paul (McCartney) says he was making the first steps towards dance music. I agree with that, they were the first to make those methods popular.

They were all into moustaches at the time. I thought George Harrison had a pretty cool moustaches. Brendan (James, drums) attempted a moustaches look at on stage but it was too hilarious to keep on with it. We were all sat out the moustaches look.

Brendan already had a beard so he shaved it off apart from the tache and he tried that to much amusement. They did it well, moustaches aren’t really around these days. You just need someone to grow the perfect moustaches and inspire a new generation of moustaches-wearers. Perhaps I’m the person to do it.

You could say The Beatles were responsible for a generation of crusty hippies who refused to wash their genitals. But I like that whole flower-power movement. I wish I was alive back then, I’d have had a great time. It seems a bit clueless now but at the time it would have all made sense and been quite exciting.

I guess their most hippy-ish moment would be ‘All You Need Is Love’, but I never got into it on the level where you want to throw away all your belongings and live in a field. I just thought it was cool that this was the first time a band had done a worldwide satellite broadcast.

When I was young and started listening to The Beatles I didn’t realise John Lennon was dead. Then one day I took my mum’s vinyl copy of ‘Abbey Road’ out of its sleeve and all the press cutting about his death fell out. I froze. It was such a sock. I was probably about nine or ten at that time. What a way to find out he was dead, being happy, going to put on ‘Octopus Garden’ and then suddenly… suddenly I was very sad.

If I could somehow meet John Lennon I’d like to say to him… actually I’d probably just be lost for words and end up giving him a big wet kiss on the lips as my way of saying, ‘Well done’. I’d possibly do this with tongues, because he’s not an unattractive man. Actually that depens on whether he looked the same as in his Beatles heyday, I wouldn’t want to kiss a rotting corpse.